We have high home-solar uptake here in Australia, but the problem on the whole is that you then have a grid needing to cater for peak load without having the regular income to make it financial. Makes for a bit of a death spiral. They need higher prices to cover grid costs, which drives more people to put on solar, and so on.

I’ve only thought about this for five seconds but that seems like a pricing structure issue rather than something inevitable.

I have a friend who works in the energy sector and has a strong focus on solar. He's talked about this as a major issue for a few years. I don't know if it's inevitable, but would influence a lot of industry policy.

https://www.energynetworks.com.au/news/energy-insider/the-de...

Early adopters of solar here had very strong feed-in tariffs, but these are non-existent now for new sign-ups because otherwise energy companies were paying out more and more, while still having the same grid/maintenance costs. It disincentivises people from upgrading their solar capacity too. If you got 3-5kW way back, but upgrade to 10kW now, you lose your lucrative feed-in tariff.

Going back many years, I remember my grandfather risking his health because he was scared of unpredictable electricity bills should he run his A/C. That's probably an argument against smart metering, at least for the elderly.

There's often talk of distributed battery systems. e.g., trial programs where houses with solar and batteries pool efforts.

Regardless, for every household that effectively goes offgrid, it leaves the fewer, remaining customers paying for the same powerlines and facilities. Solar uptake is about 30-40% here, from memory.

It's almost as if grid providers need to be competitive with alternatives. I'm currently getting about half of my electricity through solar+battery, and that's only going to grow until I'm no longer dependent on my utility at all.